Most vehicle radios have an anti-theft feature that locks up the radio whenever the power to the car is disconnected, disabling all functionality and cutting you off from your music. The radio can then only be unlocked by entering its radio code, sometimes known as the security code or authentication key. This code is designed to be known only by the car owner, theoretically making the stolen radio useless to thieves.
However, in practice there are many reasons that a radio or navigation can become disconnected from power, such as when the car's battery goes dead or is running too low. Increasingly, as the computers and ECUs in modern cars become more and more complex, garages and mechanics often need to disconnect the battery just to repair or service a car. Many more experienced garages, MOT centres and automotive services purchase the code from us directly, but others will return the car to its owner with the radio now locked, leaving the car owner to find us themselves instead.
At RapidRadioCodes our business model is based around automation of radio code decoding. These in-house automated systems are what we invest the majority of our engineering time on, allowing us to decode 99% of our radio codes instantly and at such a low price, while still having the time everyday to improve our systems and figure out algorithms for new manufacturers. This means that if we are able to decode your vehicle's make, we're likely to be the cheapest radio code generator you'll find anywhere.
Unfortunately we're not currently able to decode all the vehicles that we would like, but our engineers are constantly pushing boundaries and working hard to implement algorithms and databases for new manufacturers and models. If you believe you have a working algorithm or database for a particular manufacturer, feel free to get in touch with us – we may be willing to pay for these if verifiable.
The good news is that even though we can't currently decode as many manufacturers as we would like, if you've ended up on our site through the manufacturer page for your vehicle (e.g. Ford), it's because we likely are able to generate a code for it, in which case the only differences between us and most other decoding sites are:
Over the past few years we've increasingly noticed many companies in this industry using deceptive practices to gain customers and reviews. These include:
If you do decide to use another online decoding site, you should make sure they're not employing any of these practices and check their TrustPilot rating for yourself. Any business employing these practices is also likely to be purchasing fake TrustPilot reviews, making even their positive reviews unreliable.
Here at RapidRadioCodes we pride ourselves on our ease of use and good customer experience, and that means being able to accept payment in whichever payment method is most convenient for you. This is why, in addition to supporting 10+ traditional payment methods, we also accept payment in 3 different cryptocurrencies. Here is a non-exhaustive list of the payment methods that we support:
Both Apple Pay and Google Pay have their own strict platform requirements. To see the option for Google Pay when paying for your radio code you must be using the Google Chrome browser with a card saved in Google Wallet, and to see the option for Apple Pay you must be using the Safari browser with a card saved in Apple Wallet.
This is a common mistake made by customers who don't understand how radio codes are entered on non-touchscreen radios – for example, if their generated radio code contains a 7, they assume they need a number 7 button on their radio to enter it. However this isn't true, because very few non-touchscreen radios have more than 6 number buttons. Instead, radio codes are entered using the numbers 1 to 4 on your radio, where each number corresponds to that digit of the radio code. If this sounds confusing, don't worry - all of our radio codes come with specific entry instructions for your radio, completely free of charge.
We are usually unable to offer refunds for working radio codes, including radio codes generated from an incorrectly entered serial number, so when entering your radio's serial number into our decoders it's important to double-check that you've entered it correctly.
If you entered your serial number correctly and your generated radio code still does not work to unlock your radio, it is our policy to provide a full refund. Although rare, this does happen (see this question for why). To help us confirm that this is the case for your radio, please contact us with a picture of your radio's serial number and a video of the provided code being entered into your radio. We require this information both to process your refund and for fraud prevention purposes. To see our complete refund policy, click here.
RapidRadioCodes™ is a small independent business based out of Sheffield, Yorkshire, in the North of the UK. Our mission is to be able to instantly generate radio unlock codes for all cars, vans and trucks, at a single fixed price that's cheaper than both the dealerships and other third-party decoding sites. Since first being established less than a year ago, we've already helped over 11,000 drivers, garages and car dealerships unlock their radios, and received hundreds of 5-star reviews across our TrustPilot and Reviews.io pages.
